Digital Restoration
of 19th Century Photographs:Eight CDVs of Early Locomotive
Engineersof the CPRR and UPRR

The vast majority of the thousands of images
displayed on the Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum
website have been scanned from original 19th century commercial stereoviews,
photographs, engravings, lithographs, maps, and other types of images.
In order to provide the most useful images possible to its visitors, the
Museum has done its best to select originals for display as exhibits which
have survived relatively well over a period of 130 years or more.

Many images, however, are from extremely rare originals
of which very few were produced, and, in some cases, perhaps no more than
just one or two still exist. In cases such as these, therefore, the only
rare or unique image available at all may be very badly damaged. In order
to prepare such images for exhibition at the Museum therefore necessarily
required a great deal of professional digital
image restoration.

The eight "Carte
de Visite" (CDV) images displayed below are just such a case. These small (2 1/2
x 4 inches including card mounting) albumen print portraits made between
1868 and 1874 are of eight engineers who we surmise drove the locomotives
for the CPRR and UPRR on the Truckee, Salt Lake and Ogden Divisions. All
of these prints have moderate to severe insect damage with two of them
having as much as 25% of their original images' emulsion missing.

However as these are the only such portraits that the
Museum has ever been able to locate of the men who actually drove
the first trains to traverse the then newly completed Pacific Railroad,
it was felt that it was important to include them in this exhibit despite
their extensively damaged condition. (Indeed these may well be the only
surviving images of these eight railroad pioneers.) In order to display
them, therefore, I undertook the task of digitally restoring them to as
close to their original condition as possible.

After many hours of careful work the final results
are displayed below.

In order to see the extent of the restoration necessary
in this project, also included above is a side-by-side comparison of one
of these images in its actual current condition and the same image after
it has been digitally restored. This 1868 portrait of CPRR engineer Dan
Hanton required an extremely large number of individual steps to reconstruct
and restore
it to its final form seen below.

While the digital restoration necessary for these eight
images has been unusually great, almost all of the other images which appear
throughout the Museum site have also had similar work done on them in order to
make them as clear and visually pleasing as possible.

(Note: The Palace Art Gallery did not exist prior to 1875
when the Palace Hotel was built across the street, and the Gallery existed
as late as the late 1890's. So this picture had to have been
taken
in 1875 or later. Perhaps the 1868 date is the date the engineer was hired.)